by Denis Pitts
“If I let you overdraw, there wouldn’t be a bank left in a month’s time,” said d’Isigny. He took out a wallet and gave Claudine a five-hundred-franc note.
“Here, go shopping with your mother. I have some business to discuss with your brother.”
They stood as the women left the table and then sat down again. Jean-Paul saw the hesitation on the other man’s face.
“Cognac?”
“No, thank you, sir.”
D’Isigny raised a coffee cup and said: “Happy birthday.”
“Thank you, sir. Thank you for many things.”
“Jean-Paul, I have a present for you which I hope will give you pleasure. But before I give it to you, I want to explain something. When I joined this bank, my father insisted that I start from the bottom rung of the ladder. I have been a messenger, a junior clerk — pretty well everything indeed until I was thirty-five years old. Only then was I allowed to join the board of d’Isigny.
“For me it was good discipline. And one of the reasons why we are happy bank. But times are changing rapidly, and so are attitudes. To put you through the paces I went through would be a drastic waste of your talents and your academic qualifications.”
The waiter poured them more coffee.
“But I have no practical experience of banking,” said Jean-Paul.
“On the strength of everything I know about you, my son, I would be prepared to take you on the board in an executive capacity tomorrow,” said his father firmly. “Only one thing stops me.”
Jean-Paul looked up. He saw that his father was smiling.
“I must tell you some home truths. You are an introvert. You’ve got a first-class mind. But your whole life is centered around this family. It is natural enough, and I understand.
“But I want you to go away. I want you to travel the world for two years — to make an extended tour, during which you will visit every d’Isigny bank and representative in the world. These are, after all, the men with whom you will be doing business. I also order you to combine with this tour the vacation of a lifetime.”
D’Isigny leaned down and picked up a shining new brown leather dispatch case. The initials J-P d’I had been inlaid in gold in one corner.
“This contains an international air credit card and letters of credit from the bank. There is a list of all those whom I wish you to see, together with letters of introduction from me. It also contains some cash.”
He handed the case over the table to Jean-Paul. He was not surprised at the crestfallen look on his son’s face.
“Say it.”
“Say what, sir?” said Jean-Paul.
“That you don’t want to leave the country.”
“That’s true, sir. I don’t. I was alone for a long time. If you must know, I dread the idea.”
“Then why be alone? You will be with people all the time. You are, after all, a d’Isigny. If the red carpet isn’t rolled out in Rio or Hong Kong or Singapore for the boss’s son, your job is to make it the bank’s business to know why.”
“Two years is a lifetime.”
“At your age, it will pass at the speed of light, my young introvert. We will drink to your journey with Napoleon’s best. Waiter!”
OVER MUNICH, 1900
They had been getting a weak, indeterminate signal from Largo and Becker had instructed the captain to bring the aircraft as close as possible to its supersonic level as the Petite Concorde moved over the Massif Central and the Alps. He felt the aircraft begin to lose height and went forward to the flight deck. He saw the reason at once on the radar screen.
“Thunder clouds all over southern Bavaria,” said the captain. “We need to drop to twenty thousand feet and get well to the north.”
The aircraft writhed and kicked its way through the solid black clouds, and Becker was nearly thrown off his feet as he clutched the bulkhead on his way to the control room.
The computer screen read: NO SIGNAL, alternating with its own REPEAT YOUR SIGNAL.
“What’s the forecast?” he asked.
One of the technicians pressed a key.
WARM FRONT MOVING SWIFTLY ACROSS EASTERN EUROPE. HEAVY THUNDERSTORMS EXPECTED OVER SOUTHERN BAVARIA. EXPECTED TO CLEAR 2200.
The screen returned to the original NO SIGNAL.
The bumping of the aircraft had eased now and they began to fly smoothly.
Almost immediately the NO SIGNAL lettering disappeared from the screen and was replaced by several groups of figures. The decode key was pushed. The screen read LARGO. MOBILIZATION 60 PERCENT COMPLETE. UNITS NOW MOVING INTO POSITION AT PRIMARY TARGETS AS OUTLINED.
*
In the brightly lit underground room, twenty thousand feet below, the baroness watched the acknowledgment appear on her own screen. She eased herself back in the big leather seat and lit a cigarette.
Below, on the vast map table, a number of colored markers were being moved about the outline of Germany by six girls using croupier rakes. The girls wore light-blue shirts and slacks. They were taking instructions through earphones from a second controller, a middle-aged man with a thin graying moustache who sat to the right of the blond baroness and spoke quietly into a microphone.
The markers represented the huge fleet of Transbec coaches, a division of Becker Transport (Europe) Inc., which controlled almost a third of the juggernaut trucks and other heavy transporters in Europe.
Transbec coaches were famous for their luxury and the efficiency of their service. Radio-equipped, they were serviced by a constantly mobile fleet of high-speed Mercedes vans. They maintained precise scheduled services throughout the autobahn, autostrada, autoroute and motorway complex of Europe. Their superb luxury made them deadly competitors of the scheduled airlines. Each of these monster forty-seaters was fitted with live and closed-circuit television for long night journeys across the Continent.
On this night, in that same efficiency, they carried an army into action.
The procedure, like everything else in the operation, had been worked out in fine detail. On receipt of the message from controllers, drivers on long-distance runs would get their passengers as quickly as possible to any one of the Becker Roadhouses that lined the motorways and would move, again at high speed, to prearranged rendezvous points.
At the same time as the passengers were being assuaged and offered four star accommodations, the pyramid telephone system would be alerting individual members of the Becker security organizations, who would assemble at those rendezvous points.
It was a system that depended on a number of superbly disciplined men. It had been tried as an exercise under the pretext that the private security companies might one day be required to protect Becker installations against urban terrorism.
It was working very well now in Germany.
They came from their homes in every town in Germany to the Armor locations in ten centers. They roared in in their Volkswagens, Opels and Mercedeses and boarded the brightly colored buses.
They had come without question or argument; and now they sat, not knowing whether this was an exercise that would allow them to go home almost immediately or whether there was a real emergency. They were young men who had been chosen for their intelligence and loyalty to the Armor organization.
There was none of the shouting or wolf-whistling that ordinarily accompanies the mobilization of an army. These men were serious, quiet and intense.
As each coach filled, a sergeant in the organization would climb in and ask for total silence. He would place a videotape cassette into a slot behind the television set.
On the screen they saw the face of the baroness. She looked taut and worried.
“Good evening,” her voice said. “First of all, I must say that this organization is more than grateful for the speed with which I know you will have turned out this evening. I must emphasize that this is not a rehearsal. The announcement I am about to make will probably keep you away from your homes for some time. Arrangements are being made to inform your families.
“I have to tell you that the intelligence division of Armor has recently discovered the existence of a major plot by certain disloyal officers in the high command of the West German armed forces. The coup d’état they are scheming would wreck this country overnight — as well as the whole structure of the Becker organization, which, as you know, controls Armor.
“We have summoned you to take part in a pre-emptive operation which will root out these criminals, and place the politicians who have connived with them under lock and key until a proper system of government has been re-established.”
There was no Hitlerian ranting in this speech, no histrionics. They were being talked to by a beautiful and highly intelligent woman whom they respected.
Soon, she told them, they would be issued the arms with which they had been trained for just such an emergency.
“I know that we command your loyalty, men of Armor,” she told them. “And I know that you will obey your orders just as you always have, no matter how distasteful some of them may be to you.”
As soon as she had finished, the sergeants took over with brief outlines of the various objectives. The coaches were already moving as these briefings took place.
By seven o’clock that evening, as heavy rains fell all over Germany, an army of thirty-two thousand men and women was on the move in a fleet of eight hundred coaches. It had started only seven hours before with a simple code word from the house on Elba.
11
There were more than a hundred guests at the reception, and Jean-Paul greeted them all in the hallway of the d’Isigny Paris house. The President, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary had left a cabinet meeting to attend. The British ambassador was there, and so were the heads of every major bank in Europe. It was a massive demonstration of the prestige of the House of d’Isigny.
Jean-Paul was the object of considerable curiosity, for this was the first time he had been formally presented to society. He was everywhere that evening, talking money to bankers and yet being sure to pay scrupulous attention to their wives. He was at once charming, brilliant and vital.
The bankers saw him as the future head of the Banque d’Isigny. The women saw him as a superbly handsome young man who exuded virility and success, and they were almost vulgar in the way they steered their daughters into his view.
He was forced to ignore Claudine for most of the evening, and she, anxious not to detract attention from him, spent most of the reception sitting in a corner surrounded by a small phalanx of her admirers. He caught only occasional glimpses of her face — animated, teasing and lovely.
And for all the warmth and confidence which he showed that night, he felt a continual ache as he remembered what was going to happen to them.
*
They changed from evening wear into sweaters and jeans and then had steaming-hot onion soup in a small night club on the left bank. For a while, a guitarist played discreetly in a corner; when he left, a street accordionist took his place and played the music of Paris.
“I don’t want to go,” he told her.
“Papa said you didn’t.”
“I don’t want to go because I love you.”
She stirred her soup and wound the stringy Gruyère around the spoon.
“It’s like spaghetti, isn’t it? I don’t want to go either. But I have to be finished. First at school in Switzerland. Then as an au pair in England. Ugh.”
“I love you, Claudine.”
“Look at that silly dress over there. No one, but no one, should wear a dress like that ever, especially at her age. But think of it — you can go anywhere you like whenever you like. Just think of all the parties and all the places you’ll see.”
He looked at her with despair. “Please, Claudine.”
“You’ll think of me in Switzerland, won’t you? With all those books on my head, learning to stand up straight. And putting my knife and fork down while I chew my food with my mouth shut and being with those horrible snobbish girls with snooty noses who read dirty books under the sheets. I love you, I love you, too, and I don’t want you to go, and I cried all afternoon. You’ll write lots of letters, won’t you? And take care of yourself.”
“I meant I love you. Not the way you mean it.”
“How do you think I meant it?”
“Like brother and sister love. I mean man and woman love.”
“Idiot, that’s what I meant.”
They danced, and a bored waiter stood by the door and tried not to sleep. The barmaid wiped glasses noisily. The accordion player drank too much pernod and began to slur, but they did not notice.
“Can you wait two years?” he asked.
“Think how well-mannered I’ll be when you get back. I’ll have lost all my nasty habits.”
They walked through the summer-hot streets of the city, and he did an impromptu dance of exultation in the Champs Élysée and handed out money to beggars; and they painted beards on posters of women politicians; and, in the company of brass-faced whores, drank coffee laced with rum; and she sat on his shoulders as he sloshed and kicked his way along the flooded gutters; and they held hands on the Quai d’Orsay; and they kissed with delicacy in the Rue Madame; and they kissed with passion in the Boulevard des Fleurs; and they drank more rum in a seedy bar in Montmartre; and she said “I love you” many times; and he tried to seduce her in the Bois de Boulogne and failed because he was too happy and laughing too much and too filled with rum; and, at the end of the night, in the bright morning sunshine, they ate hot bread that a baker had given them and arrived back at the house to find the d’Isignys distraught with worry for them.
In the privacy of his room later that morning, Jean-Paul opened the leather document case given to him for the first time. The cash totaled five hundred thousand francs. That, he estimated, was enough.
*
On the evening of the day following his reception, Jean-Paul took the Iran Air flight to Teheran. By the time the Concorde lined up for take-off, he had written the first page of a letter to Claudine. He finished the last of forty pages as it began its final approach to Teheran.
The d’Isigny-Orient representative who was waiting for him at the airport handed him a telegram. It was from Claudine, and said simply: HOLD MY HAND.
*
It had been Jacques d’Isigny’s fervent hope that Jean-Paul would learn about more than merely the workings of the bank and its personnel. He wanted his son to meet women away from the confines of the family and to have affairs. He had prepared himself for scandal and for unhappy, gossipy reports on Jean-Paul’s progress from his agents all around the world.
Jean-Paul did indeed have affairs. On that very first night in Teheran, in a hotel room in the Tahkte Ramshid, confused by tiredness and desperate with frustration, he made animal love to a girl from Texas whom he had met in the bar and whose room he left in a torment of self-disgust.
For the first two weeks he spent each day in d’Isigny-Orient talking and questioning and reading complex reports on customers, industry and trade potential. He shunned the hotel bar and sat alone at night writing lengthy notes on the day and long, loving letters to Claudine.
In the middle of the second week, he received a cable from d’Isigny:
PURPOSE OF YOUR VISIT WAS TO MEET INFORMALLY WITH OFFICIALS OF BANK. UNDERSTAND THERE IS CONSIDERABLE APPREHENSION IN D’SIGNY-ORIENT ABOUT YOUR CONTINUAL QUESTIONS. THEY ARE OUR MOST SUCCESSFUL OVERSEAS REPRESENTATIVES. YOU ARE NOT A COMMISSION OF INQUIRY. ON NO ACCOUNT CONTINUE UPSETTING. NOW CONCENTRATE ON VACATIONAL NATURE OF TOUR. YOUR LOVING FATHER.
*
He walked in the Himalayas and he saw the Taj Mahal. He watched fireworks in Hong Kong and tried desperately to enjoy himself. The bank’s representatives were chary of him, for word had been passed on from Teheran. He flew to San Francisco, where the wife of the d’Isigny-Pacific manager tried earnestly to seduce him; and he took a train across America on which he made long and sensual love to an exchange schoolteacher from England. He took an
apartment in Manhattan and Gotham d’Isigny Inc. sent him a call girl on the first night in the city. He sent her away with her taxi fare home and went out and watched a pornographic film.
The world he saw was the identical, repetitive world of banks and bank people, each determined to impress a d’Isigny, no matter how young.
He sailed to Jamaica on a cruise liner and fought off a brace of eager Bostonian widows; in Rio he had a lighthearted flirtation with a Spanish dancer whose brother tried to knife him in a street lined with cabarets.
He climbed Table Mountain and he shot wild boar in Kenya and he drank too much ouzo and retsina in Athens and waked in the bed of a whore.
He flew to Sydney and he rode the surf of Bondi beach with the tanned and muscular daughter of the president of D’Isigny-Australia. She fell in love with him and followed him relentlessly all over the country and made an unnecessarily loud and embarrassing scene at the airport when he boarded a plane to Rome.
He had been away 280 days, and had written 280 letters to Claudine. Wherever he went, there were letters from her that followed.
He had flown to Italy to take up an invitation that had been thrown out casually a month or so earlier to join the young president of d’Isigny-Africa on a Mediterranean cruise. The boat was a seventy-five-foot schooner with a three-men crew, and the company was young. They danced on the deck and threw themselves naked into the Aegean and drank too much brandy in Cyprus. They smoked hashish in Beirut and watched Aristophanes at Baalbek and one party drove back too fast and turned their car over on a mountain road. Jean-Paul, who was following in another car, talked in voluble Arabic to two policemen who were about to arrest everybody and handed them a large roll of dirty Lebanese pound notes.
Toward the end of the cruise, they anchored off Capri. The others went water-skiing and left Jean-Paul lying in the sun with his daily letter to Claudine. He finished and handed it to the captain, who was going ashore. He walked the length of the deck and stood for a long time on the prow, looking at the island.
